I recently found out that a friend was leaving his old position for a new one. That friend had been with his prior company for a few years before the new opportunity presented itself.
His old company lists "generous yearly training allowance" as part of their benefits package. That allowance covers both things like certification-preparation training and conference-attendance costs. The company even nags their employees to take advantage of it – pointing out that using it helps employees stay relevant and so the company can stay competitive.
As we were discussing his moving on, he told me "when I submitted my resignation, they told me I owed them the full cost of a conference I attended ten months ago". This was a conference that both the company and the customer on whose contract he was working had explicitly requested he attend. The customer even chipped in to help significantly offset the costs of attending.
I was, to say the least, both flabberghasted and appalled. I've worked for several companies with training benefits. Once an employee was outside of their new-hire parole period, there was never an expectation to pay the company back for training. There was no expectation of repayment even if the employee came back from training and then dropped their resignation almost immediately afterwards. So, it forces me to ask a couple questions:
- Is what my friend's experiencing the current norm or is my experience the more normal?
- Does it seem fair or even ethical to claim that training is a "benefit" if you're on the hook to pay it back – in whole or in part – if you leave (e.g., I've never had an employer try to recover my use of medical or other, more-traditional benefits)?
- If you knew that a company was going to do this, would you ever take company-paid training or go as a company-sponsored conference-attendee during your tenure with them?
- If you knew, any time during the recruiting process, that a company was going to do this, would you waste time with that process (let alone actually accept a job)?
It really makes me wonder if his old employer has thought out the recruiting, retention and other consequences of having this unrestricted training cost-recovery policy.
Top comments (3)
All of the terms and conditions of the benefits should be made explicit. It's not like I'm going to offer a buddy "a free meal" and then after the meal, tell him he now owes me a favor because of course, there is no free lunch in this world.
I think if any company did that to us as a customer, we'd call it a scam.
If the company likes to make up whatever "unspoken rules" it wants, and I knew about it, I probably wouldn't even bother working there. They just don't respect their employees.
That happened to me in my first job. To be fair, they had just had an employee get as much training as he could and then leave, so they were wary, but they wanted me to sign something before I took a training course, and when I read it... full payback if I leave within 1 year, 50% if within 2 years. I said no, they said the course was compulsory and I said "pick one". They sent me and I didn't have to sign.
If it's in your contract, it's in your contract, but it's totally unfair to the employees. Companies should see this as a particular budget and expect some will be less beneficial to them than others.
To me it seems like a great way to drive away the people you can least afford to drive away. People that have the marketable skills and background to say "fuck that noise" are going to tend to do so. The people that don't will be the ones that stay ...which is pretty much the exact opposite of what a company wants. Worse, people that leave because of something antagonistic are likely to tell everyone they know why they left.
That said, if, as in the case you cite, they make it compulsory to take on a debt to the company, there's a non-trivial probability that a good labor lawyer could get you a fairly decent settlement without even needing to go to court.